Fix the accessibility of your Genesis responsive menu

The Genesis Framework is my favorite tool to build a WordPress website. And with the next update (version 2.2) a lot of accessibility features and fixes will be added. But a framework is no child theme.
The HTML5 themes you can purchase with StudioPress have a beautiful responsive menu for the primary navigation. And that menu is completely inaccessible for keyboard and screen reader users.

What’s wrong?

The HTML code to show the responsive menu is:

<div class="responsive-menu-icon"></div>

A div is not focusable, if you tab though a page the menu is skipped and you have no way to open it, only by using a mouse. And also the div is an empty container, with no content.

What needs to be changed?

Change the <div> to a <button>, a button is focusable and clickable

Add some text inside the <button></button> to tell a screen reader user what the button is about. You can make this visibly hidden by using the screen-reader-text class

Tell a screen reader user if the menu is open or closed by adding dynamically aria-expanded=”false” or aria-expanded=”true”

You have to add the screen-reader-text class and maybe change the CSS .responsive-menu-icon to style the button so it fits your theme.

So: by changing a few lines of JavaScript and adding a few lines of CSS you turn your responsive menu into a perfectly accessible awesome responsive menu.

Discussion

Yes, this is a quick and dirty fix. There’s now untranslatable hardcoded text in the JavaScript, this could be done way better and cleaner. But you’ve got the picture of what needs to be changed. If you are a JavaScript pro: all help is welcome 🙂

This was talked about in the Genesis Slack channel and we came up with a little fine-tuning that could be done by adding an extra aria attribute to the element. “aria-controls” tells screen readers (by ID) which DOM element is being expanded or collapsed by the button.

Since you explicitly stated that the translation part was missing, I gave a shot at adding it. I wrote a post on making the Genesis menu both accessible and translatable.

If you see something wrong with the code, don’t hesitate to give me a shout and I’ll update it. I reused your selectors but also incorporated the `aria-controls` attribute from Daves comment. Don’t know if it makes sense to mix classes and IDs like that.